Friday, July 07, 2006

Spell it. A - D - R

Remember that house with the basement with the editing suite near the concrete factory. Well, it's newest amenity is a semi-sound proof booth, complete with two styles of baffling, echo-killing insulation. It's still relatively new, so it is missing way to communicate with the person, or persons, doing the recording. Alex, the director, solved this problem by yelling instructions from the next room; hence, the 'semi' a few sentences back. Jon S. is planning on installing an intercom system.

ADR, if you don't know, stands for additional dialogue recording. You need this when the sound you originally recorded isn't 'fat'. Thin sound is bad, fat sound is good. But not too fat. If it's too fat, it will explode like Thunder from Big Trouble in Little China into a million pieces. Which brings us to our first scene of ADR, where Archie tinkers with his wheatgrass engine, which putters, but fails to really hum. No dialogue here, really, just interjections and exclamations. I'll try to get ahold of them so you can listen, but until then you'll just have to read about them. First was a 'ha-HA'. Now, this wasn't a laugh, but a discovery. It's a variation on 'A-ha', which is quite common in the inventor's argot. Then was "What the?", "Fa"(a truncated obscenity), then a couple moans, sighs and exhales.

I thought this process would be rather complicated, but it doesn't seem to be, at least not for me. I found it quite fun, but then Alex reminded me that we could be doing it completely wrong and have to throw out all of the sound. We're waiting to hear back from the post sound mixer on that one.

Later on we recorded some laughing for a scene in which the car starts on the mixture of human blood and wheatgrass juice for the first time and Archie is ecstatic. Now that I think about it, it was a lot like the 'ha-HA', only turned up to maybe a nine or ten. It was a little strange how I was able to perfectly replicate the 'ha-HA'ing from the previous, unusable audio. And believe it or not, this new stuff is much better. Before, I was a little luke-warm about this particular scene, but since we are having to ADR the entire scene, it's improved tremendously.

I also heard some striking words from director Alex today regarding a rather infamous drawing that is featured in the film. The drawing depicts an act of love in a...well, grisly manner. He said, "I don't know if that's going to stay in the movie." I'll admit it's raunchy, but Blood Car should have teeth and that drawing is one of the canines.

If you're wondering if we've changed any, we haven't. Alex still looks the same and so do I, except I have new eyeglasses.